Humpback whale makes record sea crossing

WILDLIFE

Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, October 14, 2010

This 2001 photo released by F. Johansen and taken in Madagascar, shows a female humpback whale's tail fin, commonly known as a "fluke." This photo was used to identify a whale that traveled some 6,200 miles from coastal Brazil to waters off the African island of Madagascar. (AP Photo/F. Johansen) NO SALES less

This 2001 photo released by F. Johansen and taken in Madagascar, shows a female humpback whale's tail fin, commonly known as a "fluke." This photo was used to identify a whale that traveled some 6,200 miles ... more

Photo: AP

Photo: AP

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This 2001 photo released by F. Johansen and taken in Madagascar, shows a female humpback whale's tail fin, commonly known as a "fluke." This photo was used to identify a whale that traveled some 6,200 miles from coastal Brazil to waters off the African island of Madagascar. (AP Photo/F. Johansen) NO SALES less

This 2001 photo released by F. Johansen and taken in Madagascar, shows a female humpback whale's tail fin, commonly known as a "fluke." This photo was used to identify a whale that traveled some 6,200 miles ... more

Photo: AP

Humpback whale makes record sea crossing

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It wasn't love. It could have been adventure. Or maybe she just got lost.

It remains a mystery why a female humpback whale swam thousands of miles from the reefs of Brazil to the African island of Madagascar, which researchers believe is the longest single trip ever undertaken by a mammal - humans excluded.

While humpbacks normally migrate along a north-to-south axis to feed and mate, this one - affectionately called AHWC No. 1363 - made the unusual decision to check out a new continent thousands of miles to the east.

Marine ecologist Peter Stevick says it probably wasn't love that motivated her - whales meet their partners at breeding sites, so it's unlikely that this one was following a potential mate.

"It may be that this is an extreme example of exploration," he said. "Or it could be that the animal got very lost."

Stevick laid out the details of the whale's trip on Wednesday in the Royal Society's Biology Letters, calculating that, at a minimum, the whale must have traveled about 6,200 miles to get from Brazil to Madagascar, off the coast of East Africa.

"No other mammal has been seen to move between two places that are further apart," said Stevick, who works at the College of the Atlantic in Maine.

Humpbacks are careful commuters, taking the same trip from cold waters, where they hunt plankton, fish and krill, to warm waters, where they mingle and mate "year after year after year," he said. The location of their feeding and breeding spots sometimes varies, but their transoceanic commute doesn't usually change much.

Swapping a breeding ground in Brazil for one in Madagascar was previously unheard of.

It was by browsing photo-sharing site Flickr that one of Stevick's colleagues found a photo of this particular humpback, taken by a Norwegian tourist from a whale-watching vessel off the coast of Madagascar in 2001. The photo had been taken with a film camera and the negative sat undeveloped in a drawer for years. Eventually, it was scanned and posted to the Web, where it was spotted and added to the catalog.

Stevick's colleagues matched the Flickr photo to a picture of the whale taken two years earlier in Abrolhos, an area of small volcanic islands off the Brazilian coast.

So how did Stevick and his colleagues recognize the whale as the same one photographed by researchers in 1999? Carole Carlson, Stevick's colleague, said the key to identifying humpback whales is in their tails.

Humpbacks have big tail fins called flukes, which are spotted and ridged. Carlson compared them to "huge fingerprints."

Stevick elaborated: "There's an enormous amount of information in those natural markings. There's the basic underlying pattern of the black and white pigment on it, numerous scars across the tail, and the edge is very jagged.

"The likelihood that two animals would have every single one of those things identical would be vanishingly small."